Discussion
wouldbwelder said:
Looking to get a laptop to run computer games on - what is the minimum RAM requirements for smooth operation for the acverage game ... GTA etc
1gig - 2gig? Or is it down to processor speed?
1gig - 2gig? Or is it down to processor speed?
Proc speed and graphics card type/graphics card ram amount (either on the card or shared maybe) will probably make a lot more difference here than 1 or 2 gig of system memory will.
It really depends on the spec and age of the laptop.
fidgits said:
well yeah, but unless your running a couple gigHz CPu and a 512Meg PCi-express graphics card then these sort of games will suck anyway?
I used to run GTA on AGP cards with 128 meg of ram and a 256 meg card will easily allow
a decent res and nice detail on it (and GTA SA etc) so long as the proc is half decent and giving it a kick up the bum.
I'm no laptop expert though, so maybe certain spec cards/cpus in laptops run slower
than the PC equivalent?
I'm still running a P4 2.8 and an AGP 256 meg card in my PC (X800) and there isn't much
i can't run at a 1280 res with high to max detail.
I even did a test using a geforce 2 32 meg card once and with lots of detail turned down, it still
ran GT Legends in 800x600 on practice laps very well indeed.
You don't have to run at a 1600x1200+ res with max FSAA and ansio settings to have a great looking
game imho.I just spend some time in game options finding a nice balance of visuals/performance and so far there hasn't been a great deal that has made me want to upgrade to PCI-E or 512 meg cards.In some games you can say drop one setting on shadow detail, hardly see a difference in the game itself but will gain huge FPS increases etc.Many people no longer bother though, they just assume anything other than the current top spec cards are old and slow, yet that couldn't be further from the truth.
I used to upgrade my PC's all the time in my quest for performance and was overclocking etc way before it became the norm and was built into mobos the way it is now.However i stopped doing either because everything just go so fast anyway that it no longer really mattered.
Not sure how much you are looking to spend, but I've just bought a laptop specifically for games. It was not cheap: £1.8k (with a free memory upgrade to 2 MB and printer)
I've only loaded up a couple of games, but will all of the games I've loaded I can select set all of the graphics options to the max and the games run smooth as silk. Runs pretty much silently and very little heat. Took about 1 week to be delivered too, so pretty painless (except the price!).
Model: Dell XPS M1710. 512 graphics card (top of the range card), 2Mb RAM, 2.16 dual processor. 3 year Dell Support (you can reduce this to 1 year and save 150).
As I understand it (courtesy of Pistonheads) its the graphics card that does the bulk of the work with games (i.e. graphics rendering) with help from RAM, CPU not as important.... if you need to take a call on where you spend your money.
I've only loaded up a couple of games, but will all of the games I've loaded I can select set all of the graphics options to the max and the games run smooth as silk. Runs pretty much silently and very little heat. Took about 1 week to be delivered too, so pretty painless (except the price!).
Model: Dell XPS M1710. 512 graphics card (top of the range card), 2Mb RAM, 2.16 dual processor. 3 year Dell Support (you can reduce this to 1 year and save 150).
As I understand it (courtesy of Pistonheads) its the graphics card that does the bulk of the work with games (i.e. graphics rendering) with help from RAM, CPU not as important.... if you need to take a call on where you spend your money.
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